Florida Agency Releases Dangerous Abortion 'Rules'

Guidelines mandate abortion reports, tell doctors how to end pregnancies

With Florida’s 6-week abortion ban now in effect, a state agency has issued guidelines for doctors that they say will ensure women get the care they need. In truth, the rules are a political move that will further endanger women’s health and lives.

Guidelines from Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) not only require doctors to send the state detailed abortion reports, a tactic Abortion, Every Day has been raising the alarm about, but also dictate how doctors should end pregnancies. The guideline’s language could even force physicians to give women c-sections rather than abortions—another nightmare tactic that AED has been tracking.

Consider one of the most common post-Roe horror stories we’ve seen: women who were denied treatment after their water broke too early for the fetus to survive. (Also called preterm premature rupture of membranes, or PPROM.) In a section about how doctors should treat patients with PPROM, the agency does not tell doctors that they can give women abortions. Instead, they say the patient should “be admitted for observation.”

If a physician determines that the woman’s life is imminently at risk from the pregnancy, the guidelines still don’t tell doctors to provide her an abortion. Instead, here’s the language they use:

“When a physician attempts to induce the live birth of an unborn baby, regardless of gestational age, to treat the premature rupture of membranes, and the unborn baby does not survive, the incident does not constitute an abortion…”

What do you think they mean by “attempts to induce the live birth of an unborn baby?” They’re talking about vaginal inductions and c-sections. They want doctors to torture women with major abdominal surgery or traumatic vaginal birth rather than a safer, minutes-long, abortion procedure.

This is already happening in states like Louisiana, where a report from Lift Louisiana outlined how the law forces doctors to perform c-sections on patients, or force them into labor. One woman whose water broke just 16 weeks into her pregnancy, for example, was made to spend hours delivering a nonviable fetus rather than being given an abortion. The woman not only hemorrhaged and lost close to a liter of blood, but her doctor reported in an affidavit, “she was screaming—not from pain but from the emotional trauma she was experiencing.”

We’ve also seen language similar to the AHCA rules in state legislation. In Idaho, the law says that doctors ending life-threatening pregnancies must do so in a way that provides “the best opportunity for the unborn child to survive”—language that the state Supreme Court interpreted to mean vaginal birth and c-sections.

In addition to the tangible harm these rules will cause patients, what makes Florida’s guidelines so offensive is that they’re being presented as proof that women can get health- and life-saving care. In fact, the AHCA claims the rules are necessary to protect women from “a deeply dishonest scare campaign and disinformation being perpetuated by the media, the Biden Administration, and advocacy groups.” They say the rules are there to “to safeguard against any immediate harm that could come to pregnant women due to disinformation.”

This has been a common defense from anti-abortion groups and lawmakers. They insist that it’s not their bans hurting women, but pro-choicers who point out the dangers of those laws. It’s a strategy that started almost immediately after Roe was overturned, one that Florida’s AHCA has appeared to adopt in order to do preemptive damage control before the horror stories of women denied care begin rolling out.

In a flyer released yesterday, for example, the agency outlines “myth vs. fact” about the abortion ban. It tells readers, “don’t let the fear-mongers lie to you.” The flyer goes on to say that Florida’s abortion ban doesn’t prohibit health- and life-saving abortions, but the carefully-chosen language they use indicates otherwise. Check out what the flyer says about treatment for PPROM, for example:

The agency doesn’t say the ‘myth’ is that women won’t get care, but that they’ll be “sent home” without care. And their ‘fact’ doesn’t say that women can get abortions, but that doctors will follow “established standards of care.” Standards of care that the AHCA themselves has defined!

The other thing to note about these guidelines is that they’re very similar to the ‘Med Ed’ laws that I’ve been warning about. Republicans claim that ‘Med Ed’ legislation—which mandate that state health departments put out guidelines for doctors—will help physicians know when and how to treat patients. What they really do, however, is allow conservatives to define what conditions constitute life-threatening pregnancies. They also allow lawmakers to enshrine inaccurate and politically-motivated definitions of abortion.

As you know, the GOP has been systematically redefining ‘abortion’ to exclude miscarriage treatment and treatment for ectopic pregnancies, an attempt to divorce abortion from healthcare. In the AHCA’s guidelines, they do just that—writing that it “does not constitute an abortion” if doctors end an ectopic pregnancy, for example.

Rules like these aren’t being issued for the benefit of women or doctors, and they’re not being published in order to ensure that people can get the care that they need. They’re PR tools, plain and simple—a way to convince voters that Republican lawmakers really do care about women. But Florida’s new guidelines only prove one thing: Our lives come second to their politics, and always will.

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